Development of Maintenance Management System by Functional Evaluation for Rural Roads in Himachal Pradesh

Abstract

Rural roads in Himachal Pradesh play a significant role in the economic and social development of the state in India. About 79% of the total length of the roads has been contributed by rural roads in Himachal Pradesh. The maintenance of this vast network of rural roads is challenging for the authorities of state highways. Also, the funds required for their periodic or daily maintenance are not in abundance, hence proper maintenance strategies are required to use the resources in a proper manner. The present study deals with the development of maintenance management plan of the rural road network in Himachal Pradesh. The pavement evaluation is required at regular intervals to determine the pavement performance and plan strategies accordingly. Pavement Evaluation can be done in two ways- Functional Evaluation and Structural Evaluation. The functional evaluation deals with the pavement distresses and pavement riding comfort i.e. roughness of the pavement and structural evaluation deals with the structural properties of the pavement i.e. pavement deflection, modulus reaction etc. In the present study functional evaluation is considered in which various pavement distresses have been studied which mainly prevails on the rural roads of Himachal Pradesh. Along with pavement distresses, skid resistance and mean texture depth has also been studied in the current study. Six sample road sections have been selected to conduct the study in the region of Shimla and Solan districts. The distress and roughness data has been collected on the selected stretches for a length of 2.5 km each. The 2.5 km length has been selected for conducting the tests on each road as the stretch represents the whole length of the road in respect of climatic factors and traffic volume. The study also aims at developing a mathematical model to predict the pothole volume using mean diameter and maximum depth of pothole as input parameters. It has been found that a non-linear model predicts a good value of volume of pothole with coefficient of determination i.e. R2 = 0.85 which shows a very good correlation between observed volume and estimated volume of potholes.